Profiles of 2004 Graduating Students

Irene Chung is crafting her academic career with a personal vision

Chung

By Bill Steele

Irene Chung is either a shining example of what can be done with Cornell's interdisciplinary structure or the exception that tests the rule. She wasn't really able to, paraphrasing the university founder's vision, find instruction in every study -- she had to construct a lot of it on her own.

Born in Ohio of Taiwanese parents, Chung lived in several states and briefly in Taiwan before her family settled in Ellicott City, Md. Her interest in art was kindled at the age of 3 when her father, an engineer with a few extra talents, began drawing pictures to teach her the alphabet. In Ellicott City's Centennial High School -- where she graduated first in her class -- and in private art classes, she spent about 40 hours a week drawing and painting, she said.

She chose Cornell because, "It was the place that could offer me the most of what I didn't know." A course in Web design, which she took for the design aspects, introduced her to programming, and she decided she wanted to use the computer as an artistic tool. As a College Scholar, she set out to combine computer science, visual studies, the fine arts and some psychology to explore computer graphics and animation, but, she said, "Many of the courses I wanted to take were either hard to get into or hadn't been given in years."

She made up for some of that with practical experience. She created a scheduling and administrative system for Cornell Emergency Medical Services and served as a student consultant for the university's Academic Technology Center, which helps faculty use electronic technology in their teaching. In one of two summer internships at Intel, she created a Web-based statistical process control system for a company factory.

Courses in East Asian studies crept in "by accident," and through a IIE Freeman-ASIA Scholarship, she spent a semester in Japan. Along with taking 18 credit hours in a Japanese university and "looking around the country," she got to work at Production I.G., a company best known here for the animations in the "Kill Bill" movies and known to anime aficionados for the quirky series "Furi Kuri." There, she developed a multilingual Web content management tool, with a Web site as a byproduct, and in return got to hang out with the animators.

In her senior year, she studied computer animation with Donald Greenberg, founder and director of the Cornell Program of Computer Graphics. As evidence of her continued dedication to art, she's turned down several job offers for straight programming work while considering graduate school and other options.